Acronis True Image Home 2011 scheduler starts and fails every morning

Stuart,

Did you check the log of Acronis TI in the Help menu? You should be able to see what task started and failed.

Stuart,
Go back into the Schedule screen and click on advanced settings.
Look at what is checked under this special screen.

Pat L and Grover H,
Thanks for your suggestions. They were helpful.

First I looked at the Log and saw that the morning after my weekly differential backup (of all the partition images) something runs called "Backup validation". It appears that I only get this running of Acronis the next day when I do not have the external hard drive attached to my notebook PC. Consequently it fails with the log message "The system cannot find the path specified" which makes perfect sense because I only attach the external drive when I perform the one weekly backup. It doesn't appear to run every day as I misstated in my original posting. The other thing I noticed is when I open Acronis (with the external hard drive attached) it tells me that the backup is "corrupt", but I can successfully run the task for the next differential backup. Clearly it tries to check the backup at a time when the external hard drive is not attached, doesn't find the backup, and marks the backup as "corrupt". The question is, how do I prevent these "Backup validations" from running?

Grover, when I go to the Schedule - Advanced settings it does have the "Wake up the sleeping/hibernating computer" checked and the "Run at system startup" checked. However, I have the schedule turned off. In any case, I unchecked these two options and clicked on "Do not schedule", and when I revisit the schedule it has turned them on again. Why is it running "Backup validation" in the first place?

Thanks,
Stu

You might want to have the "wake from sleep" to be checked.

As for why the validation is running, there is a good chance that one of your tasks has one the validation options set to "once a montlh". You have the option to perform or not perform validation following the task; but you also have another validation option which is preset to "once a month" and the user must change that setting if the "once a monlth" is not wanted..

Grover H,
Thanks so much. I'm sure you're right because my backup task did have it trying to validate at times when the external drive was not connected. I changed it to only validate right after creating the backup.
Stu
P.S. My window for changing validation looks completely different than yours, but I had no problem changing it to what I wanted. I figured you have a different version of Acronis True Image Home than I do (2011 update 1 build 6597).

I am having a hard time following this thread which seems to be about my problems. I was able to use Acronis 2009 fine but this new 2011 and windows7 has me running around in circles. I DO NOT want to schedule any backup as the external hard drive I will use is not connected until I want to do a manual backup. Software keeps doing scheduling which fails and I now have a list of many backup with 0 bits in them. Software does not seem to let me delete them under penalty of not working any more. Sorry as a 72 year old novice am having a hard time with this product. Can you give me a step by step how to:
1. turn off ALL automatic scheduled backups Want to do it manually.
2. how to delete these 0 byte backups from the list of backups

PS Wondering if the reason the listed backups with 0 bytes is because it can not locate the external hard drive when they were stored???

Hi Exgovie,

P.S. After posting this message I noticed that NONE of the images I embedded show in the posting.  I'm sorry about that, but whatever I've tried doesn't work.  So I'm going to put all the images (in the order they were supposed to appear) into one ".jpg" file and attach it.  I hope that works okay for you.

I believe I can help you because I use Acronis True Image Home 2011 in exactly the same way that you do and had the same problems:

1. Turn off ALL automatic scheduled backups Want to do it manually:

A. ALWAYS connect your external hard drive and turn it on BEFORE you start Acronis True Image.

B. Start Acronis True Image and you should now have a screen that looks something like this (it says "Acronis True Image Home" at the top):

C. Right-click on the name of the backup and then left-click on "Edit backup settings".  (In my example above, the name of the backup is "2011-04-18-").

D. You should now see a window that looks like this (which says "Disk Backup" at the top):

E. At the bottom of the window shown above, left-click on "Disk backup options".

F. You should now see a window that looks something like the one below (which says "Disk Backup Options" at the top).  If it doesn't, left-click on the tab near the top that says "Advanced".

G. Now left-click on the line that says "Validation" to open those options.  The window should now look like this (which still says "Disk Backup Options" at the top):

H. To the right of the line that says "Regular validation" in the above window, left-click on whatever words yours says.  (Mine says "Weekly, on Tue" in the above window.)  You should now see this window (which says "Scheduler" at the top):

I. Left-click on the "Do not schedule" button.

J. Now you should be back to the window that says "Disk Backup Options" at the top.  Here is where you have to decide to check or not check the option that says "Validate backup when it is created".  If you left-click on it to make a check mark, it will validate the backup immediately after the backup is created.  That sounds nice, except for the fact it will spend more time validating the backup than it took to create it.  My choice was to NOT check that box because I didn't want to spend that much time on the backup and because I trust that if the backup had a problem, Acronis Tue Image would tell me in an error message.  So make your decision about this check mark, then left-click the box next to "Save the settings as default" near the bottom of this window, then click the "OK" button near the bottom-right corner of this window.

K. Now you should be back to the window that says "Disk Backup" at the top.  Look for the line that starts with "Schedule:".  If the first word immediately after "Schedule:" does not say "Off", left-click on whatever it happens to say.  You should now see a window that looks like this (which says "Scheduler" at the top):

L. Left-click on the button near the bottom of the above window that says "Do not schedule".  You will now be back to the window that says "Disk Backup" at the top.  Left-click on the button near the bottom-right corner of this window that says "Save".  You now have turned off ALL automatic backups.  This headache is solved.  I'll address your next headache in a separate response below because this one was so long.

P.S. After posting this message I noticed that NONE of the images I embedded show in the posting.  I'm sorry about that, but whatever I've tried doesn't work.  So I'm going to put all the images (in the order they were supposed to appear) into one ".jpg" file and attach it.  I hope that works okay for you.

Stu

2. How to delete these 0 byte backups from the list of backups

A. Follow the instructions in my posting immediately above labeled A and B.

B. Right-click on the name of the backup and then left-click on "Delete backup".

Stu

Thanks for your help. Point about having my external drive connected prior to opening Acronis was right on. As for deleting previous backup listed my problem was an error came up. Turns out this was due to the fact that Acronis Scheduler2 Service was not set to come up automatically. This can be changed under Services.msc. Once I got this error corrected I was able to remove the blank backups from my list. followed your insructions to manually set for no scheduled backup. Will see how it works.